Frieze Editors Discuss the Best Works of the 21st Century

This year, frieze asked 200 artists, curators, critics and museum directors to name the most outstanding works of art from the past quarter century. From their nominations, we compiled a list of 25 works that have shaped contemporary art since the year 2000. Below, four frieze editors discuss the results.

Read the full list here

Andrew Durbin A surprising aspect of this list is that there are no post-COVID-19 works. It feels like we’ve been living in this nostalgia-driven era for some time, and the usual forward momentum of the art world has been suspended.

Terence Trouillot I agree with you. I think we’re still living in that post-COVID-19 moment, and it feels weird to look back on it already. In addition to the lack of post-COVID works, there are also works from the early 2000s that are missing, and I wonder if this is due to the median age of the respondents and our age as a group.

AD We asked 200 people to nominate three works each, so that gave us 600 pieces. Looking at the longer list, I suspect there’s an overcorrection for recency bias. Particularly in the West – and ultimately this is a very Western-skewed list – there’s a kind of nostalgia for the 2010s. These were the Obama years, the market was riding high, cash flowed, there was a different level of excitement. This list reflects that. We ultimately focused on established artists, critics and curators – essentially people in their late 30s to 70s – who remember those times.

Sean Burns The mechanisms for commissioning large-scale artworks have been affected by COVID as well. There may be structural, behind-the-scenes reasons why works on the scale of Francis Alÿs’s When Faith Moves Mountains [2002] aren’t necessarily being commissioned now – the money isn’t there. Our number one is somewhat understated, but several others on the list are big, expensive artworks like Kara Walker’s A Subtlety [2014] or Danh Vo’s We the People [2010–14]. Presumably, those were made possible by commissioning structures that existed before COVID.

Cassie Packard It feels pertinent that no major works of bio art are included, too. The genre, broadly speaking, predates the 21st century but has reached a fever pitch in the past few years; it feels central to the discourse today. I think that rise has a lot to do with the biopolitical effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the breakdown of public trust in the face of widespread misinformation.

SB If I were to nominate one post-COVID artwork, it would be Steve McQueen’s Grenfell [2023], which depicts the remnants of Grenfell Tower six months after the fire.

AD I think that’s such a great work to point to. When I reflect on the 2020s, it’s often the exhibitions rather than individual works of art that have stood out for me as influential. As controversial as it was, documenta 15 [2022] seemed like a major turning point in contemporary art, for better or worse. If we were making a list of the most influential exhibitions, that would be in my top five.

TT To that point, it’s not necessarily the ‘best’ works, but the works that have garnered the most attention and sparked the most conversation, that have made the list. Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument [2013] is a piece that I personally struggled with. Glenn Ligon famously wrote a glowing feature on the project for Artforum, but you can’t get away from the fact that it was a big-name artist parachuting into the Bronx. Walker’s work was also very controversial at the time, and yet here it is at number three.

SB It feels like the works we’ve chosen are the most exemplary of each artist’s practice. John Akomfrah’s The Unfinished Conversation [2012], for instance, really distilled concerns that he’d been building throughout his career. It’s similar with Anne Imhof’s Faust [2017] – it’s a kind of coming together of work that she’d done before. The same is true of so many of these artists. Ryan Trecartin’s I-Be Area [2007] is probably the most synthesized example of his project.

CP Sean, those last two works are among those on our list that reflect upon or actively engage with social media networks and the way images circulate through them. I think about Imhof’s performances in that sense, and some of the violence of Walker’s A Subtlety lay in how pictures of it were shared online in a way that was often very offensive.

SB I’m happy that Cameron Rowland’s Attica Series Desk [2016] is our number one. I remember when we did our 30th anniversary edition, we’d spoken about them being among the most important artists of their generation, and there’s something in Rowland’s treatment and interrogation of objects that I see so often in younger artists’ work. If we’re thinking of influence as being one of the measures of who belongs on this list, then I think they are justifiably at the top.

AD I agree; Rowland strikes me as an inflection point as an artist – one that resonates with younger artists, such as Rhea Dillon, and older ones as well. Louise Lawler’s decision to incorporate their work [New York State Unified Court System, 2016] into her retrospective at MoMA [2017] was a significant gesture and speaks to the artist’s cross-generational appeal. A lot of lists like this have emerged throughout the year, and almost invariably, Arthur Jafa’s Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death [2016] is at number one. Yet I’m struck by how much that work feels of its time today. But when I look at Rowland’s desk, I think: wow, it is still so immediately powerful.

TT Speaking of the zeitgeist, this work was addressing what was on our minds in 2016 – the prison industrial complex, ideas around the 13th Amendment and chattel slavery. That same year, there was also Ava DuVernay’s film 13th, and these conversations coincided with the violence against Black bodies in the US then and in years prior – Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Alton Sterling and many others – all leading up to the murder of George Floyd in 2020. So Rowland’s work resonates on many levels: it’s deeply tied to political and social realities but also connects to art-historical conversations. Your point about Lawler is important too – it recalls Marxist critiques of the art object from the 1960s and ’70s, which still echo within this work. Altogether, it feels incredibly rich, grounded in both history and the present, and these are conversations we could still be having today. Rowland is an important artist and will likely remain so for the next 20-plus years.

CP To your point about the 1960s-era connection, I see Rowland’s work as a form of expanded institutional critique that quite effectively and movingly takes aim at racial capitalism.

Looking over the list, I was a little surprised that there weren’t more overtly queer works.

AD We do have queer artists here, but except for Marlene Dumas’s ‘Great Men’ series [2014–ongoing], the queer politics of their work feel slightly muted. I guess the question, then, is: what queer works from the past 25 years are we missing?

SB Perhaps queerness operates more implicitly in some of these works, such as Imhof’s and Trecartin’s. If we’re talking about more overt extrapolations of that subjectivity, one of my personal nominations was I Miss You by Franko B, which is a very visceral, body-related performance from 2003.

CP Top of mind for me is Community Action Center [2010], a sociosexual video by A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner, which was very important within a queer New York context.

AD I would have liked to see something from Nicole Eisenman. One of the summarizing works of the Floyd moment is her painting The Abolitionists in the Park [2020–22]. I thought I would see that on this list.

TT I was also surprised it wasn’t included. But as we’ve already mentioned, the focus is on works of the 2010s.

AD We once did a discussion at frieze of the artists of the 2010s. It was interesting to revisit, because only Danh Vo and Ryan Trecartin made both lists. I named Jordan Wolfson as the artist of the decade, but I don’t think he received a single nomination.

SB Many of the pieces on our list engage sincerely with their subject matter, rather than treating art as an arena for mischief or duplicity. Perhaps longevity is somewhat forged from the kind of connection that sincerity can create.

AD There are no real villains here! [laughter]

CP Many works on this list have or imply a politics that I imagine our voters may agree with. Maybe that factors into what we consider ‘the best’ or accounts for the lack of ‘villains’, as you say.

AD I’m surprised Jeff Koons isn’t on the list. It seems people treated it more as a question of what they love, rather than what’s the most representative art of the past 25 years. For that reason, it may make sense to people within the art world, but to a wider public it would be pretty inscrutable. They’d ask: where’s Ai Wei Wei, where’s Yayoi Kusama, where is Marina Abramović? I don’t think we got a single recommendation for any of them.

TT It’s funny that our art director really struggled with the layout of the print feature because some of the work is so conceptual and arty-farty [laughter]. But that’s exactly what makes this list so great.

_{Main image: Anne Imhof, Faust, 2017, performance documentation, German Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale, 2017. Courtesy: the artist, Sprüth Magers and Galerie Buchholz; photograph: Nadine Fraczkowski}